Biggest DeFi Hack Ever? Axie Infinity's Ronin Drained of $625 Million

Ronin, an Ethereum-linked sidechain developed by Axie Infinity creator Sky Mavis, has confirmed a major security breach in a recent blog post.

The project lost roughly $625 million (173,600 Ethereum tokens and 25.5 million USDC tokens) after Sky Mavis’s Ronin validator nodes, as well as Axie DAO validator nodes, were compromised and drained by a malicious actor last week.

This could be the largest decentralized finance hack in history, topping the $611 Poly Network heist that took place last August.

The Ronin hacker was able to create fake transactions with the help of compromised private keys.

While Poly Network managed to retrieve virtually all of the stolen funds, it remains to be seen how Ronin will handle the historic hacking incident. The address associated with the attacker remains in control of the vast majority of the stolen crypto.

Developers behind the Ronin network have already started working with law enforcement officials as well as blockchain sleuths to track down the hacker behind what appears to be the largest DeFi heist ever.  

The price of the Ronin (RON) governance token has crashed nearly 30% as a result of the hack, according to data provided by CoinMarketCap.    

Ronin was launched last February in order to get rid of exorbitant gas fees and make transactions much faster. In January, the Sky Mavis team introduced the RON token.

According to data provided by blockchain sleuth Elliptic, the attacker behind the catastrophic Ronin bridge hack has already started laundering proceeds.